Wordpress SEO Vs Joomla SEO

What CMS is better for SEO, Joomla or Wordpress? Lets clear up a few misconceptions shall we? SEO and CMS are not now, nor were they ever, causally connected.

You don't need to use a CMS to build a perfectly SEO'd website and therefore your choice of CMS has no real baring on your SEO strategy. To use a house as an analogy... whether you build your own house (HTML website) or you build on from set blue prints (CMS website) you'll still be dry when it rains...!

The old Joomla vs Wordpress debate boils down how easy it is for an admin to SEO the site they are building. The debate is usually focused on "out of the box" features... How does the router build URLS? How does site structure work in each CMS? Those sort of questions.

But here's the problem, these things are becoming less and less important to you SEO strategy. For SEO strategy, we must focus on USEFUL, RELEVANT, INTERESTING and ENGAGING content. (From now on I'll refer to this as URIE content). Having the occasional duplicate URLs matters not, if you have URIE content.

I'll give you a picture of what I mean... you have two websites:

The first website, is meticulously structured, with perfect URL structure, nice keyword placement and unique meta data on each page. The text on each page is vaguely relevant to the overall site subject but is wordy and boring.

The second site has a loose URL structure, all the pages are lumped into one category, and there are no SEF URLs. There is no over-reliance on keywords. The content is relevant and useful. The author has used engaging HTML5 elements like <canvas> to write graphs that convey useful stats, they've used video, images and audio as well as other interactive features.

So given the SEO strategies you've read about over and over again, which of these sites will rank higher on Google?

The lazy SEOer will say site 1, since it "ticks all the boxes"... but we know from practical examples, that site 2 will not only rank higher on Google, but will score massive kudos on the social networks and engage with communities who are interested in the subject matter.

Ideally, your site will be a mixture of both of these sites. Your site should at least have SEF URLS and have a good overall siote structure, but most importantly it should have URIE content.